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A real world view of Content Manager OnDemand concepts

Deborah Matamoros (Debbie) is a Software Developer with IBM Content Manager OnDemand. She has 26 years of development experience at IBM, with the last seven of those years in CMOD. Her area of expertise is Report Distribution. Debbie holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Oregon and currently resides in Park City, Utah.

The system components that are required for creating, retrieving, and viewing a Content Manager OnDemand report are a storage set, an application group, an application, and a folder. These elements, in combination, allow a CMOD administrator to define and create a report definition that can be used to index and load data into CMOD.

Concepts by examples

Let’s take a look at how these concepts might relate to organizing your kitchen:

Storage set - A storage set is defined to maintain data from similar application groups, just like our kitchen contains items related to cooking or eating.

Application group - An application group represents the data that you store in CMOD. We can think of an application group like the cupboards in our house. You might have a cupboard for pots, another for dishes and another for spices. A bank might have an application group for credit card statements, another for bank account statements, and another for daily deposits.

Application - An application defines the data that is to be indexed and loaded. An application associates the data with an application group and specifies the type of indexing process to be performed on the data. We can think of an application like our cupboard organization plan. When we put dishes in our cupboard we plan where the dishes will go. We stack all the large dishes together and put them in the same spot each time. We do the same for small plates and bowls.

Folder - A folder is the interface that allows a user to search for reports and documents that have been stored in the CMOD system. A folder is similar to a label you might put on each cupboard identifying the items in the cabinet. The label identifies the exact cupboard you should open to retrieve the desired item. In our bank example, a folder could be defined on the credit card statement application group to retrieve all credit card statements for January. Another could be defined to retrieve all credit card statements for customer Joe Smith.

In summary, just like a well organized kitchen can remove the chaos of cooking dinner, a well organized CMOD system can remove the chaos of storing and retrieving your documents. For more indepth look at CMOD, check out the IBM Redbooks publication, IBMContentManagerOnDemand Guide, and other blog posts listed below.